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The Rise Of The Enterprise Personal Assistants

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Venkat Malladi, Co-Founder & CTO, VymoVenkat is responsible for building the product and technology that helps enterprise sales teams do more

Around ten years ago, there was a sea-change in the consumer internet space. Erstwhile applications that resembled databases being queried for results were being swiftly replaced by a new breed of applications that was architected to be smarter and also more helpful. The likes of Uber (founded - 2009) and Airbnb (founded - 2008) sought to transfer more power to the user and short circuited all of the stuff in the middle.

These applications were not just smarter, but imbibed the following key principles:
1. Instant Gratification: ‘Give the user something now before you ask her anything'. Unlike applications at that time, the on boarding and set up was seamless, and the time to delight a user was minimum. For instance, you could book cabs on Uber with one-tap instead of multiple calls back and forth.

2. Contextual Recommendations: ‘Tailored to the user's personal, professional & social profiles'. The applications weren't a one-size-fits-all passive database that spit out data based on in-put, but these were contextualized to the user's location, preference and so on. For example, Airbnb showed you homes nearby your location.

3. Progressively Intelligent: ‘Get to know the user better and be more
useful with time' The Day 0 experience on the app and the Day ‘n' experience on the app was vastly different. The applications could preempt user needs and become more useful to the user over a period of time. Applications became more prescriptive in nature.

This disruption was largely enabled by the adoption of mobile and consequent explosion of data. It was possible use tap a user's device signals (location) and process this data at scale to provide intelligent recommendations with minimal action from the user.

VDSA (Virtual Digital Sales Assistant) will become the primary interface by which sales representatives manage their work.


The dichotomous relationship be-tween enterprise and consumer applications was starting to diverge at a more rapid pace than ever before. How could a user, who could order food or book a cab in one-tap, be expected to fill out eight different fields to enter an Opportunity in the CRM for benefit at some unknown point in the future?

The adoption and engagement on the applications were in stark contrast, with even the top three CRMs in the World at <30 percent engagement. Enterprises, which spent millions of dollars to implement these large applications, were beginning to recognize the need for more proactive applications and that focused on outcomes. Gartner recognized this in their notes on the Third Wave of Sales Automation,

VDSA (Virtual Digital Sales Assistant) will become the primary interface by which sales representatives manage their work. When combined with artificial intelligence systems, VDSA will become the cognitive system that removes much of the inefficiencies common in B2B sales processes. -Tad Travis (Gartner, 2016).

We built Vymo (www.getvymo.com) to realize this mission - to help Enterprises move beyond implementations to outcomes. Vymo is a Personal Sales Assistant that detects sales activities such as calls, meetings, emails or messages automatically, and then based on data, predicts what a salesperson should do next. Vymo is used by over 75,000 salespeople in over 50 World-leading organizations, such as AXA, Allianz, Generali, Citibank, HDFC, Yes Bank, and Abu Dhabi Finance. Vymo is recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor & CB Insights and funded by Sequoia Capital.